The Real Adventure eBook

She told herself this was a nightmare—­something
to be fought off, kept at bay. But how did that
help her now, when the armor must be laid aside?
Sometime or other she must turn out that light and
lie down in that bed, defenseless. She had never
in her life asked more of her courage than when, at
last, she did that thing. There were nine hours
then ahead of her before eleven o’clock and the
next rehearsal.

CHAPTER III

ROSE KEEPS THE PATH

Rose rehearsed twice a day for a solid week without
forming the faintest conception of who “the
girl” was or why she was “the girl up-stairs.”
She didn’t know what sort of scene it was for
instance that they burst in on through the space marked
by two of the little folding chairs brought up from
the floor of the dance-hall for the purpose. The
group of iron tables borrowed from the bar and set
solidly together in the upper right-hand corner of
the stage whenever they rehearsed a certain one of
their song numbers, might with equal plausibility represent
a mountain in Arizona, the front veranda of a house
or a banquet table in the gilded dining-hall of some
licentious multi-millionaire. They got up on
the insecure thing and tried to dance; that was all
she knew.

During the entire period, and for that matter, right
up to the opening night she never saw a bar of music
except what stood on the piano rack, nor a written
word of the lyrics she was supposed to sing. Rose
couldn’t sing very much. She had a rather
timorous, throaty little contralto that contrasted
oddly with the fine free thrill of her speaking voice.
But nobody had asked her what her voice was, nor indeed,
whether she could sing at all. She picked up
the tunes quickly enough, by ear, but the words she
was always a little uncertain about.

It all seemed too utterly haphazard to be possible,
but Rose decided not to ask any of the authorities
about this, because, while the possibility of Grant’s
return dangled over her head, she didn’t want
to remind anybody how green she was. But she
finally questioned one of her colleagues in the chorus
about it, and was told that back at the beginning
of things, they had had their voices tried by the musical
director, who had conducted three or four music rehearsals
before John Galbraith arrived. They had never
had any music to sing from but there had been half
a dozen mimeograph copies of the words to the songs,
which the girls had put their heads together over
in groups of three or four, and more or less learned.
What had become of this dope, and whether it was still
available for Rose in case she were animated by a purely
supererogatory desire to study it, the girl didn’t
know.